Greetings, Dear Reader!
Thank you as always for your engagement with our neighborhood news publication. I'm writing to share some updates and information about the McKinley Park News and our development as a local news outlet, business and platform for our community.
As I've written before, our enterprise model is reliant upon a local news publisher embedding within the community of coverage. We've been hobbled by residing outside our neighborhood while working through a rehab project for our "forever home" in McKinley Park. Our construction schedule had us moving back this month, but changes have now pushed this back to early fall.
I've been champing at the bit to return to our targeted editorial calendar of a new news item each weekday, but there's no way this can be sustained until we're back in the neighborhood full-time. Accordingly, I've been knocking off some monumental projects while also working on reporting — including lots of great contributions from Neighborhood News Correspondent Kevin O'Neil — and dribbling out news articles at a slower pace. Throughout, we've kept our neighborhood event calendars updated, and our subscriber features current.
All of our bigger-picture projects are part of our overall plan for platform and operations, and they would have been implemented in short order. However, especially while still remote from the neighborhood, it has made sense to get them completed and do the best we can for now with updated news reporting.
2024 Accomplishments To Date
So far this year, we've entirely updated our platform and erased any technical debt, overhauled our Sponsor program and its pricing and features, executed our first direct mail marketing campaign, shared our plans and goals for expanding into a neighborhood news network (if the McKinley Park News is successful), and formalized our business planning, including neighborhood-scale economic analysis and identification of paths toward hopefully significant revenue.
More recently, we finalized rollout of our Sponsor News and Sponsor Events features, and refreshed our Institutions program and its accounts and features, including Institution News and Institution Events.
Some other recent tweaks have included adding a "New" scroller to the top of many pages: This highlights the site's many daily updates, even though they might not all be home page headlines. Performance and production upgrades now let us serve fast-loading AVIF images, and we've also restored and improved our Neighborhood Forums and classified ads.
Your News Should Not Spy on You
Most recently, we've published our User Technology Recommendations, since accessing the McKinley Park News requires a device and Internet connection. Like all of our operations, our platform, its technology and our recommendations are bound by a chain of trust, which allows us to actually act in service of readers and users, respecting your privacy instead of benefiting from your exploitation. Your news should not spy on you.
In this, the McKinley Park News stands alone, especially locally, through our commitment to user and member privacy and security. We're also the only independent local news source that still provides the opportunity for feedback, community and interactivity through things like commenting on articles, discussion forums and other membership features.
Of course, you can't build community if you don't respect the people who participate in it. This is the reason behind not only our pro-privacy practices and advocacy, but also Terms of Service that ensconce no selling or sharing of user content and member data. We'll only build an online publication and community that we'd want to be a member of ourselves.
We'll Keep You Updated
You'll continue to see new neighborhood news articles published here in the McKinley Park News, and once we're back in the neighborhood, we'll ramp up to full editorial production. I'll certainly keep readers like you informed of our progress and schedule.
In the meantime, we'll also be polishing off some more upgrades, updates and fixes on our list, especially improving the experience of our members and related community features.
We deeply appreciate your patience and understanding as we continue to develop and return to full editorial operations. Thank you for your attention and ongoing engagement with the McKinley Park News!
— Justin Kerr
Publisher, McKinley Park News
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